


Taste of Arsenic

by scioscribe



Category: All About Eve (1950)
Genre: Do Her or Be Her?, Enemies to Lovers, F/F, Mirror Sex, Post-Canon, Vaginal Fingering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:53:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27844795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: She could have acted like a sap for anyone, but she had poured her heart into it to trap Margo—Margo, who was no one’s fool. It would have been easier to be a pitcher plant in someone else’s dressing room, but Eve had made her choice, and she had never regretted it. She said, “I admired you.”“And I came with accessories. Attached talent like Bill and Lloyd.”It took Eve a moment to even place the names. She shook her head. “It was always you.”
Relationships: Margo Channing/Eve Harrington
Comments: 10
Kudos: 47
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Taste of Arsenic

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Beatrice_Sank](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beatrice_Sank/gifts).



The last time Eve had seen her had been in London. Margo had been in a new play, _Temperance_ —a historical drama with Puritans and Margo in a white apron and a stiff black dress that stuck with her all the way down to her wrists and ankles. The costume didn’t suit her. There was nothing puritanical about Margo Channing. She was good, though, good enough that Eve could almost forget it.

But never entirely. Margo was a great actress, but she wasn't the kind to lose herself in a part. All her technique and training fell away when you got close to her: she was always and forever Margo. They weren’t what had kept Eve in the audience, all those years ago, night after night, pinned in her seat like a butterfly, her gaze so rigidly trained on the stage that her neck had gone stiff.

Margo’s first and best skill was more visceral than that. Impossible to teach—not that Margo would have tried, not for Eve’s sake or anyone else’s—and impossible to copy. Charisma. Starpower.

The ability to stand around with your hair in pin curls and a run in your stockings and a scowl on your face and command the attention and admiration and detestation and _lust_ of everyone in the room. Margo just lived more deeply than other people, and everyone felt it. The whole world inclined towards her; your heart went to her like it was forced there by gravity. Attention pooled around her, getting deep enough sometimes that maybe even Margo worried she could drown in it.

Eve didn’t have that. She was starting to realize she never would.

In the end, it would always come down to this: Margo on stage and Eve in the audience, as sickeningly pulled to her as everyone else.

It didn't matter that her star was on the rise, and it didn't matter that all the movies meant that more people knew her name than had ever known Margo's. She was an ingenue, even if she wasn’t as young as she pretended. When she aged out of it, even as good as she was—and she was damn good—there would be no Lloyd Richards coming out of the woodwork to write for her. She would scrape by playing mothers and silly aunts. She could already taste it on her tongue, as bitter and necessary as aspirin.

If she had to fade away someday, Eve decided, crumpling the playbill into her bag, she wanted her best and brightest years to set the whole country on fire. No more theater, not anymore. She wanted to be twenty feet tall. She wanted the camera to _drag_ something luminous to her kicking and screaming, if that was what it took.

If Margo opened a magazine anytime in the next ten years, Eve wanted her face to be the one on the cover.

_Look at me for a change. Look until your eyes start to burn._

She left the theater, left London, gave up her apartment in New York—and didn’t see Margo Channing again for four years, when she walked into a producer’s office and found Margo already there. Margo, accepting a light for her cigarette.

She was wearing a mint-green linen suit and she looked only a little older, with fine lines at the corners of her eyes, and she hadn’t changed her hair. She hadn’t changed at all. Eve could tell just by looking at her.

“From what I’ve heard,” the producer said, looking back and forth between them as if he were amused, as if he thought they were going to break into scratching and hair-pulling right in front of him, “the two of you don’t need to be introduced.”

“No, we’re all old friends here,” Margo said. Her smile was a fishhook; bite those lips once and you’d come reeling out of whatever world you thought you knew. “Aren’t we, Eve?”

“Of course. Margo was my mentor.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

The producer said, “Margo’s going to play Abigail.”

In Eve’s newest film, _Take Two Lovers_ , Abigail was a character part—a kind of glamorously brassy older cousin to Eve’s heroine. She was a one-scene wonder whose earthy savoir-faire broke down over the course of a single long speech until it ended with her dry-eyed at the end of her own tearjerker monologue, dry-eyed and telling Eve’s character, Lucy, not to cry. _Don’t waste your time, dear. I was a lost cause ages ago_.

It was what would send Lucy running back to her milquetoast husband. Eve, who had run far away from the only husband she’d ever been unlucky enough to acquire, had thought it was pure corn, that it might wind up getting laughed out of the theater.

 _We need someone with presence,_ the director had said.

They had found Margo, apparently. And they were right. Margo would know how to sell it.

“She’s a good choice,” Eve said. It was her business voice—creamy and cool and dispassionate.

Margo didn’t look fooled. She smirked a little around her cigarette. Her lipstick was a shade darker than it should have been, but it didn’t matter.

“I was a little worried myself until I met her,” the producer admitted. “Theater to movies.”

“Eve did it,” Margo said.

The producer looked at her. “You were in theater?”

“Of course I was.” She didn’t mean to snap. “How else would Margo have been my mentor?”

“She even won a very prestigious award,” Margo said. “Naturally, though, you’re right. Theatrical training can make you too broad, at least if you’re democratic. The back row deserves its show too—I suppose that’s the argument. But I can’t imagine Eve would have that problem. She’s always known how to deliver a perfectly calibrated, perfectly _targeted_ performance.” She turned to face Eve head-on, and Eve hadn’t realized until then that Margo had mostly been looking at her out of the corner of her eye. There was no flash of surprise at Margo taking her in, though. Margo had—or thought she had—figured out who Eve was a long time ago.

Margo said to her, “You always knew who you were playing. And who you were playing for.”

“Well,” said the producer, looking back and forth between them. Eve had forgotten about him by then.

“We should have drinks, just the two of us,” Margo said. “Catch up.”

 _You must think I’m a fool,_ Eve thought. She smiled, close-lipped. “Of course.”

Margo tapped the ashes off her cigarette. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. “I’ll bring the arsenic,” she said.

*

They had the drinks at Eve’s.

“Home field advantage,” Margo said, looking around. She was wearing a bracelet that kept sliding forward on her wrist and tinkling against her glass. “You’ve done well for yourself, not that I would have expected anything less.”

Eve had had time—not enough, but some—to think of how she would play this. Margo was right: she’d always known how the right performance could slip, knife-like, right between someone’s ribs, and when she had known who to cut, she had always done well. She knew she could play the aggrieved innocent now. That was what she’d decided on. Margo would never believe her, of course, but it would turn this cutthroat tennis match Margo wanted to just Margo, playing against a wall. Eve could pretend not to understand why Margo hated her now.

 _I’m so glad I could finally show all this to you_ , she was going to say, starry-eyed. _You helped me so much at the beginning, and I could never forget that. Every day, I look around here and I almost pinch myself because I think I’m dreaming—and it all started in your dressing room._

Talk about corn. But people bought it, for some reason. They liked helplessness, liked little bunnies and fawns on wobbly legs, as long as they were cute and tender and loyal as dogs.

Eve had liked it herself, for the little while that Phoebe had given it to her. But she’d grown out of that. The only vulnerability she liked now were chinks in armor, and those were the only kind she intended to allow herself.

Margo was a crack that ran down the center of her. Margo was the knife between her ribs, hurting her every time she breathed, and it had been that way for years. All Eve had to do was not give that away. If you didn’t show you had a suit of armor, no one looked for the weak spot.

She let the starriness creep into her eyes, but then, without quite deciding on it, she let it go.

“Thank you,” she said coolly.

Margo took her in. “So you’ve decided you’re through with all the claptrap.”

“We’re alone,” Eve said. She was leading with her chin, she realized. It was a habit her last director had talked her into, for a particularly headstrong part. She canted her face that way now, just out of habit, boisterous as a boxer.

Margo said, “I think—I can’t quite remember now—that I once swore never to be alone in a room with you again.”

“That’s very dramatic.”

“Yes, it is. A forgivable sin from an actress. Less forgivable is being so irritatingly wrong about where the problem lay—which was never in letting you near me. Alone with Eve… you’ve probably had a profile called that by now. On a one-on-one basis, you’re quite charming. Still.” Margo added the last bit graciously, like _Eve_ was the one who had gotten old, who had aged out of her leading roles. “My mistake was letting you near anything and anyone I loved. My mistake was falling for your cheap, wide-eyed melodrama.”

“It wasn’t all melodrama.”

“Wasn’t it?”

No. She could have acted like a sap for anyone, but she had poured her heart into it to trap Margo—Margo, who was no one’s fool. It would have been easier to be a pitcher plant in someone else’s dressing room, but Eve had made her choice, and she had never regretted it. She said, “I admired you.”

“And I came with accessories. Attached talent like Bill and Lloyd.”

It took Eve a moment to even place the names. She shook her head. “It was always you.”

Margo scoffed a little at that, but she didn’t say anything.

“What does arsenic taste like, anyway?” Eve said, almost idly.

That was more of a laugh than a scoff, and it was an indelicate laugh at that—almost a snort. “Nothing.”

“I thought it was bitter almonds.”

“You haven’t played enough mysteries. It’s cyanide that smells like bitter almonds. Arsenic doesn’t give you the courtesy of that kind of warning.” She drank again. There was that silvery tinkle of her bracelet against the crystal, and something in Eve caught the sound like the reverberation from a bell. “That’s why,” Margo added, “I thought it might be your weapon of choice. It’s subtle.”

“I suppose that’s a compliment.”

“I suppose it is, at that.”

Though in all the mysteries Eve _had_ played in, they always made a big show of poison being a coward’s weapon. A woman’s, too—as though the two words were interchangeable. She waited for Margo to hit her with that—Margo must have heard it at least as many times as Eve had—but Margo didn’t. She just crossed her legs and leaned back against Eve’s sofa, green against cream. She looked like she owned the place.

Suppose Margo wiggled into her life now, like a termite in the woodwork. Suppose she chewed a path to the heart of her.

It would be something, Eve thought, looking at where the leather strap of Margo’s shoe wrapped around her ankle, to be the subject of Margo Channing’s obsession. Dangerous, certainly. But—alluring.

Margo said, “I never knew you were so appreciative, Eve.” Her voice sounded overripe, amused. She rolled one foot around, slowly, like she was warming up for some kind of dance.

Eve forced herself to look away. Her face felt too hot for her to pretend she didn’t know what Margo meant. “Everyone appreciates you,” she said, as coldly as she possibly could. “I’m sure you’ll be popular on set.”

“Are you? How funny, I never have been before. ‘Margo Channing is difficult,’ that’s what people say.”

“You _are_ difficult.”

“And you’re easy,” Margo said. “Is that it?”

Eve didn’t want to make her way through the maze of insinuations there. “What I am is tired.” She set her drink down. Funny, she felt almost tipsy, but she hadn’t refilled it, not even once. There was even still a half-inch left in the glass. “I’ll see you on set.”

“Not very often, I shouldn’t think. I only have the one scene.”

“Good,” Eve said.

Margo laughed at her. When her lips came together again, they were turned up at the corners. It had been a while, Eve thought unwillingly, since she had last seen Margo enjoy herself this much.

*

They shot the scene with Abigail early on, only a few days into filming.

It would be good to get it over with, Eve told herself. Even in her head, the sentiment rang hollow. She had wanted this scene to round off their filming, wanted it as some dark and bittersweet dessert almost too rich to bite into. She wasn’t getting it that way. In Hollywood, you never got what you wanted, you just got pictures taken of you getting the next best thing.

Never mind. With Margo, there was no next best thing. You got what Margo wanted you to have or you got what you could take from her, and it was always too little. Fourth best, if that.

Margo’s Abigail was magnificent, of course. Eve looked at the lights to get her tears started, but she hardly even had to.

She had played Lucy, her dimestore Emma Bovary, with the lacquered layers of artifice her director had wanted from her: Lucy was supposed to be a woman hiding from herself. Even in this scene, this turning point with Abigail, Lucy was supposed to give away little more than a solitary tear. The real outburst would come later, when she fell sobbing into that idiot Edwin’s arms. But in front of Margo, Eve felt horribly ragged, as bloodied and rough and ugly as a torn fingernail. When she cried, it was partly because that the scene demanded it—and Eve was professional even when she was nothing else—and partly that only a complete dissolution right then would have ungraciously topped Margo—and she wanted that, _craved_ the chance to make Margo the audience for a change—and partly because this was it, this was all there was. Margo was going to go, possibly even all the way back to New York, and Eve wouldn’t see her again. Not like this. Not with home field advantage. Not with the two of them finally sitting opposite each other, star and audience at the same time.

This was the taste of arsenic—clear nothingness all the way through.

“Yes, keep that,” the director said, after he’d called cut. “That’s the emotion we talked about.”

It wasn’t the emotion they had talked about. They hadn’t talked about it all.

Eve nodded. They did a second take, a third, a fourth, and then that was it. Eve went back to her dressing room and sagged into a chair. It would be two hours before they’d need her again, even for a hair and makeup refresher. That was something. In two hours, she could drink until her thoughts were fuzzed over. She could shower and let the hot water thrash something out of her.

She almost snarled when she heard the knock on the door.

She bit down on her lip, hard, until she was sure she wouldn’t say anything that would make some cheap gossip rag. “Who is it?”

“Who do you think?” Margo said through the door. She sounded lazy, casual in a way Eve had never been. In a way she couldn’t be.

She couldn’t feel her hands when she unlocked the door and let Margo in. It was like her nerve endings had shut down where they weren’t needed; they were too busy throbbing everywhere else. Her throat felt rigid, corded with muscle. She was surprised her jaw wasn’t locked.

Margo shut the door behind her.

Eve turned her back to her. “What do you want?”

“Maybe just to congratulate you. You held your own.”

“It’s my picture,” Eve said sharply.

“And _Aged in Wood_ was my play, and you almost stole it out from under me. Turnabout’s only fair, you know.”

“Turnabout. God.” Eve almost laughed. “You still have everything, Margo. You have your career. You have your friends. Do you think I have any?”

“You wouldn’t know what to do with them if you got them,” Margo said. “You didn’t know what to do with me.”

“Yes, I did,” Eve said. “I do.”

When she kissed her, it felt like she was trying to break herself against Margo’s body, as if she wanted to come away with enough bruises and scratches to know, once and for all, what they’d done to each other. Margo’s hands found their way to Eve’s hair—“Your goddamn hair,” Margo said, against her ear, the words a hot, hard explosion of breath. She had gotten some of the pins loose, enough to knot her fingers in. Eve was coming undone everywhere. She had to keep something between them—she had to keep herself from being overwhelmed somehow. Margo would eat you if you weren’t careful. Eve had known that from the start. It would be so easy to fall for her and never get up again.

She knew what it needed to be, too. The same thing as always.

She got the word out in between the times when Margo’s mouth was covering hers: “Mirror.”

“And to think I once believed you were a total innocent. All the fun I missed out on.”

“Not that much fun,” Eve said. She couldn’t believe that she was handling Margo this way, moving her around so easily and directly—moving her with Margo’s full cooperation, even, with both of them finally wanting the same thing. “At first I just watched you. All I wanted was to split your life open and get inside it.”

“And now?”

“And now—” She thrust Margo forward a little, against the mirror, until Margo's breasts were pressed against it. She watched the reflection of her hand tug up the hemline of Margo’s skirt, watched her hand disappear beneath it. It made Margo’s lips part, and Eve saw how they were pinker and lighter on the inside. “Now I want you. And you’re already split. I just have to slip in. Like you’ve been waiting for me.”

It was the most honest thing she’d ever said to anyone, and she didn’t even know that Margo was listening to her. Margo’s eyes were half-closed, and she was grinding forward onto Eve’s hand.

Never the perfect audience. Maybe she couldn’t be.

This was how it was, she guessed. This was all she or anyone else could get. It would just be her fingers thrusting into the tight, slick heat of Margo’s body instead of whatever kind of pathetic sex she would have craved before, without even knowing it—being Margo, probably, and fucking herself on her fingers because there was no one else, only her own reflection. Now she knew they were two, like she’d said. She had to live with that—that Margo would never look at her the way she looked at Margo.

But then Margo did. Something in her eyes made her look as coiled and ready to strike as a rattlesnake. She lolled her head back against Eve's shoulder and looked at their shared reflection.

“Aren’t you a picture,” she said in her throaty drawl, the one that always sounded like there was a laugh behind it, way back in the dark. “I’d feel you back too if it wouldn’t mess up your dress. You need that for your next scene, don’t you?”

She worked her fingers against Margo’s clit. “You could be careful.”

“But I’m not,” Margo said. “I’ll take it under advisement, though.” She kissed Eve again, straining her neck to do it. Apparently she had no compunctions about ruining her makeup or her hair. “Look at you. Ruined.”

“Is that what you want?” Eve said, a little breathlessly. She was still looking at their reflection, at the blur of her hand moving around under Margo’s skirt. She wished she could see what she was doing. Maybe that would even be worth giving up the reflection.

“No,” Margo said, to Eve’s surprise. She’d expected a yes. Then she laughed--a short, not very nice laugh, and said, “Not until you’re done, anyway.”

Eve sank down on her knees, grateful for the plush carpet of her dressing room. Her cheeks were aflame and her lipstick was smeared all across her mouth. Margo turned around, leaning back on the mirror, and Eve raised Margo’s skirt and saw everything she’d ever wanted to see: Margo’s soft thighs, the light brown hair between her legs, the neatly wrinkled folds of her cunt. She was seeing all this with her own eyes, firsthand, and there was even more to it than that. More to life than looking. She could smell Margo. As she leaned forward, teasing her tongue against Margo, she could taste her.

Margo let out a little sound, and one of her hands settled down on the back of Eve’s head. She was a little more gentle now, not trying to demolish what was left of the hairstylist’s work.

“There’s a girl.” Her breath was catching in her throat. “You’re very good at this, Eve.”

She must have been, though she’d never gone this far before. Margo wouldn’t have lied to her about it, though. Not now.

“I like you so much more like this,” Margo was saying up above her. “You didn’t need to pretend to be anything else.”

Yes. She pressed a kiss against the inside of Margo’s thigh, like a kind of stamp of apology.

That part wasn’t true, though. They couldn’t have gotten to this place any other way.

Margo tasted like saltwater, like something wild, and her body flexed against Eve’s tongue as she came for her. Eve licked her clean, like it was old times again—Margo’s revised version of them, where they had done these things from the start. Like it was still her job to clean up after Margo’s messes.

But when she was through, Margo pulled her up. There was something strange in her eyes—not a snake’s attention now, but an audience’s. Hungry.

“Hands against the glass,” she said.

Eve obeyed her, and she watched with a kind of awe as Margo brutally rucked her skirt up her thighs and slipped her fingers under the silk of Eve’s underwear.

“The benefits of stockings over hose,” Margo said. She was so close in that her breath fogged up the mirror and made it look like Eve, spread-legged, was being stroked open by some kind of blurred ghost. “You can’t do this with hose. Though if I had to claw a hole in something to get at you, right now I think I’d do it.”

She crowded Eve, moving the two of them tightly against the mirror until Margo’s wrist must have been pinned against it. It was cold against Eve’s bust, her nipples stiffening through her bra and dress. The sweat on her face was leaving a blotch of damp foundation on the glass. Her head was turned to the side, her mouth pushed out of its true shape. She felt like this was the person she had wanted to be her whole life. She was breathing so hard that she felt like she couldn’t really breathe at all, and she could hear her teeth grinding as she tried not to cry out.

Margo’s fingernails were a little too long, and all the pleasure Eve was feeling was interrupted with the occasional shock of blunt pain. She liked that too—it dragged everything out. It would have been over all too quickly otherwise.

It was over all too quickly anyway. Before she had even pushed herself off the mirror, before she had even started learning how to breathe again, Margo was wiping her fingers clean with a handkerchief.

Eve didn’t want to turn around. She watched Margo in the mirror instead, a reversed Margo who wore a curious look of satisfaction and uncertainty.

“That may have been a long time coming,” Margo said finally.

“Yes.” She began reassembling her hair, stabbing herself too hard with all the pins. The stylists would still tell her she’d made a mess of it, but at least she wouldn’t return to the set looking so damn debauched. “Did you get everything out of your little Hollywood venture that you hoped to?”

“Where you’re concerned, my plans never seem to account for everything.”

“Of course. You were planning on arsenic.”

“Well,” Margo said, “the day is young.” She touched one of the curling hairs at the nape of Eve’s neck.

*

It was two weeks before Eve heard from her again. Margo sent her a large box of luxury chocolates, all the kinds of truffles that were Margo’s own favorites, because Margo had never bothered to learn anyone else’s and took it for granted that her own taste was best. They were all Eve’s favorites, too, because she had once spent so much time dreaming of Margo eating them out of her hands.

There was a note, written in Margo’s slanting, careless handwriting. It didn’t say anything about love or forgiveness.

Inside the envelope, with the note, was a worn ticket stub from the New York premiere of _Pauline,_ the first movie Eve had starred in, where they'd put her name on the marquee. Eve touched it. The paper had gone buttery soft, like the ticket had been carried around for a long time.

The note said:

_These should be delicious. Of course, remember: arsenic has no taste. You'll have to take your chances.  
_

Beneath that, Margo had written her address—it was a Manhattan apartment Eve had never been to before. Somewhere fresh.

Eve tucked her legs up under herself and bit into one of the truffles. It tasted like bittersweet chocolate and orange. When she went on living, she had another, and another.

Four days later, she let herself finish off the last of the box. Then she went ahead and booked a flight to New York.


End file.
